A postmortem of suspended Twitter accounts in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Abstract

Social media sites such as Twitter have faced significant pressure to mitigate spam and abuse on their platform in the aftermath of congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Twitter publicly acknowledged the exploitation of their platform and has since conducted aggressive cleanups to suspend the involved accounts. To shed light on Twitter’s countermeasures, we conduct a postmortem analysis of about one million Twitter accounts who engaged in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but were later suspended by Twitter. To systematically analyze coordinated activities of these suspended accounts, we group them into communities based on their retweet/mention network and analyze different characteristics such as popular tweeters, domains, and hashtags. The results show that suspended and regular communities exhibit significant differences in terms of popular tweeter and hashtags. Our qualitative analysis also shows that suspended communities are heterogeneous in terms of their characteristics. We further find that accounts suspended by Twitter’s new countermeasures are tightly connected to the original suspended communities.